MIP approach to balancing transfer lines with blocks of parallel operations

Abstract

A novel line balancing problem is considered. It differs from assembly line balancing problems in that the operations of each workstation are partitioned into blocks of simultaneously executed (parallel) operations. The blocks of each workstation are executed sequentially. For the line design stage considered in this paper, the compatibility (inclusion and exclusion) constraints for grouping operations into blocks and workstations as well as precedence constraints are known. The goal is to minimize a weighted sum of the number of workstations and the number of blocks while achieving a desired cycle time and satisfying all the constraints. The developed exact and heuristic methods are based on a mixed-integer programming approach. Experimental results are reported.

A design of DSS for mass production machining systems

“…A design methodology for manufacturing systems can be defined as a set of procedures that analyzes and segregates a complex manufacturing system design task into simpler manageable sub-tasks while still maintaining their links and interdependencies [21].…”

“…The balancing of production lines in machining environments, as it was demonstrated in [4,21], is more complex than SALBP and SALDP. The balancing of dedicated transfer machines with rotary or mobile tables, considered in this paper, deals with grouping operations into a number of blocks (sets of operations performed by a spindle head) and assigning these blocks to working positions [4].…”

“…The quantity of equipment (spindle heads, working positions) required to produce a part with the given productivity rate defines the final cost of the transfer machine. Therefore, the goal of the logical layout optimization is to find a design variant that minimizes the number of working positions and the total number of spindle heads while satisfying all given technological constraints [4,21].…”

A Transfer Line Balancing Problem by Heuristic Methods: Industrial Case Studies

“…Hence, for TLBP the operations must be grouped into blocks of parallel operations that define the machining parameters of the equipments. Thus, the set of alternative blocks is not known in advance and, as a consequence, TLBP cannot be reduced to SALDP as well as the methods used to solve SALDP cannot be applied directly for solving TLBP (Dolgui et al, 2006b).…”

“…Some dominance rules were developed to reduce the size of the obtained graph; • a mixed integer programming (MIP) approach was developed in (Dolgui et al, 2006b). …”